Salesforce buys MetaMind for its deep learning technology

Salesforce has acquired MetaMind and plans on ending the startup's services on 4 May.

The deep learning company launched in 2014 with $8 million in initial funding from Salesforce's cofounder and CEO Marc Benioff and Khosla Ventures.

MetaMind has really set itself apart from its competition through its image recognition capabilities. The site is able to identify the items in images and a demo called MetaMind Food Identification first gave users of the service a taste of what it was capable of.

Salesforce will be integrating MetaMind's technology into its own platform. Unpaid users of MetaMinds products will be able to make use of them until 4 May, when they will be discontinued. Paid users will have an extra month to use their products which will be discontinued on 4 June. MetaMind is planning to delete all of the data that both paid and unpaid users have stored on its servers after 11 April.

The cofounder and CEO of MetaMind, Richard Socher, published a blog post where he detailed the acquisition of his company by Salesforce. The company will have the opportunity to offer its deep learning technology to even more business users on a much larger scale and he has promised that it will continue its AI research as part of Salesforce.

Salesforce acquired the machine learning startup PredictionIO last month. Also, in May of last year the company purchased Tempo AI for its smart calendar app.